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From conception to inception here is the cover art for my latest work of deranged fiction The Pigeon King, soon to be available on Amazon.

The Pigeon King is the story of a podcaster who goes to war with the ultimate noise polluters: pigeons.

Daniel J. Cameron is trying to record an audio essay on the Hikikomori (Japanese shut-ins who substitute their social needs with fantasy and entertainment). The problem is an avian infestation won’t let Daniel get a word in before ruining his recordings. It turns out there’s something supernatural about their presence and it has everything to do with the subject of the Daniel’s recording.

In a Twilight Zone-style trailer (I’ll show you later) I say the story is, “One part Alfred Hitchcock and another part Wile E. Coyote.”

With this cover I wanted to capture the cartoonish nature of the Daniel’s predicament. Charles Burns’s covers for Carl Hiaasen’s fantastic mysteries inspired this layout.

I thought it would be fun to give you a peek behind the curtain of my artistic process, from the first pigeon photos I took to the first illustrations and finally the cover itself.

Like at this big proud bastard.

In this first sketch I was trying too hard to be photorealistic. It didn’t work.

I Disneyified this version by 50%.

The cover of The Pigeon King my latest mind-bending short story.

Nemo wants to taste The Pigeon King.

Expect a lot more Pigeon King content on the blog in the not too distant future.

I write supernatural horror and I’m naturally drawn to anything that makes the world seem weirder and more fantastic, even if it’s terribly tragic.

Tell me there are people who hunger for objects with no nutritional value, and I’ll write a story about an ad agency tasked with marketing bricks as food. Tell me there are people who get off on bee stings and I’ll write a story about a masochist who makes a cabin out of honeycomb. Tell me someone seriously suffers from a fear of long words and I’ll write a story called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, just because I can.

My natural instinct is to pry your obsessive compulsion from your hands and give it to a character of mine, because I think it’s spooky, because I think it’s neat. Not because I want the world to understand what you’re going through.

Submitted for your approval, a blog on writing fantasy, horror, and the myriad of genres in between. Brought to you by a Mister Drew T. Chial, an author voted most likely to be sucked into cyber space, where he now resides.

From this void Drew has amassed a multitude of motivating maxims to share with his following.

He’ll help you cross that colossal cosmic cube that keeps creatives from commuting through the astral plane. In other words, he’ll get you past writer’s block.

Together you’ll beat back the tropes and clichés that plague modern writing, learn what to do if someone has already used your idea, and find out how to summarize an entire story in a single page.

Follow him if you’re looking for a different flavor of inspiration. Follow him if you want articles on writing that go into more depth than mere definitions. Follow him if you like cynically sarcastic satire on the whole sordid scene.

In just one moment you’ll be able to visit Drew Chial dot com. The price of admission: your attention.

Also, be sure to like, subscribe, comment, share, tweet, up vote, reblog, swipe right, ring the bell, follow on social, join the newsletter, back my project, become a patron, and say a little prayer.

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A lot of people imagine a writer’s room to be a fortress of solitude. They picture a crooked citadel where a hunchback feverishly scrawls his quill down a scroll high above the incessant babble of the peasants down below. In his book On Writing Stephen King prescribes such a space:

“When it comes to writing… The space… needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut… There should be no telephone… no TV or videogames… If there’s a window, draw the curtains… it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction.”

I write in a coffee shop surrounded by pyramids scheme pitch sessions, awkward Tinder dates, and speakers blaring auto-tuned dub step songs. I find the crooked citadel to be a lonely place. I write in public to give myself the illusion of human interaction.

I find a writer’s room to be more of a state of mind. In that sense I do see it as a sacred space where certain distractions and opinions need to shut out for the writer to get anything done. I’ll explain what I mean with characters that are by no means within the public domain. (Please send your cease and desist emails to drewchialauthor.com, thank you.) Continue reading How to Shut Your Audience Out of Your Writing Room→